I have always considered warnings to be a kind of dare (personal)

I feel sometimes like I'm running away from real life.

These days, there's nothing in the slipshod gestalt of life expectations I carry around to account for the majority of things. Most of the time, it's nothing as romantic as the path less traveled by. It's more along the lines of desperate hacking through an alien, posionous jungle in an attempt to find civilization.

Utterly lost here, in the middle of this wilderness, there is choice paralysis. In every direction there is potential. In every direction there is the unknown. I could be a hundred yards from salvation if I stay my course, or I could be one missed cue away from complete ruin.

Part of me says, "Quit. Get a square job. Take classes part time. Settle into a narrow existence with predefined boundaries. Have certainty at the end of each day." This is the voice of fear and uncertainty.

Part of me says, "Father. Farther. Every limit and barrier you have ever found has been illusory at best and temporary at worst. Grab life by the throat and wring it dry. Find El Dorado in the mountains or perish in the attempt." This is the voice of hunger and contempt.

My urges are increasingly divergent from the gently curious boy I once was. It's not enough any more to see what's behind the next hill and return home at night, to make forays into inexperience and return to a domesticated baseline. Gone are the times that both urges can be satisfied simultaneously.

Contending with the urges is the actual self. I am both unnerved and amused by what is happening to me. Sometimes I try to make an objective comparison of what I am and what I thought I should be. In some ways, a gross parody of what I was. In others, a logical conclusion to a series of specific choices.

Shuffling around in injection molded foam shower shoes and the repatched remains of cargo pants, not the sharp suit or lab coat I'd always imagined, or had been imagined for me. Body language alien, confusing to my family, gestures and mannerisms more comfortable on dirt floors than the teak of my parents' living room. A taste for coffee and eggs in the morning replaced by a welcoming appetite for green tea and leftover naan, this of all perhaps the most disturbing to me.

And on my ever less frequent returns to the old world, I find myself a frequent victim of culture shock in my own homeland. I feel sometimes like any minute I'm due to start whispering to myself about the horror...

Warning labels on everything nowadays. They'll tell you how to not get killed, but I wonder: Why are there no labels to tell you how to live?